Have you had recent experiences? I thought the same until I tried it out, on decision stable no less. The driver support nowadays is incredibly good on Linux (my desktop Bluetooth didn't work under Windows with official drivers; just works without any tinkering under Linux).
One of my machines is always Linux desktop; I've been using it to see if it's ready enough for my main desktop to switch over and so far my verdict has been it's not.
Last weekend I tried updating to Linux 7.2, and WiFi drivers failed to compile, so it's been fun.
All I’m saying is that if your idea of driving a car is to sit on the engine compartment and pull levers and cables from there, you might have a different experience than most drivers.
More that my motherboard came with a Broadcom WiFi chip instead of MediaTek which everyone recommends for Linux, and the shipped Linux drivers can only use 1 of the 4 antenna and won't connect to any 5ghz networks.
It "works" with 2.4 with 1 antenna, but the speed is then capped at 150Mbps instead 600Mbps/1300Mbps the hardware is capable of.
So it's like buying an AWD car, but realizing only one wheel gets power. Still technically drivable, but hardly working well. Maybe most people wouldn't even notice at all, but I figured I was technical enough to get in the weeds and fix it.
I use Linux mint on my desktop. Wifi just works. I’m using some X870 motherboard.
I got the motherboard when it was really new, and I think it took a few months before wifi worked properly in mint out of the box. (I use Ethernet anyway so it wasn’t too upsetting). But after a few months, they had it all sorted. I have never manually compiled a kernel or wifi drivers or anything on this machine. I suspect most Linux users don’t do stuff like that any more.
Not to say it’s a trouble free experience. I’ve had problems with the nvidia drivers a few times recently. In the transition to nvidia’s new driver model, I’ve somehow ended up with incompatible nvidia packages on my system and the graphical environment broke. The most recent time I asked Claude code to take a look at my system and tell me what commands I should run to fix the nvidia packages. It did a great job.
It doesn’t feel like a kit plane any more. It’s a bit temperamental from time to time, but for the most part Linux just works.
It's compile drivers or research your hardware before you buy it. The latter is highly recommended. If you go against the common advice, it's kinda your problem. If you bought the hardware before installing Linux or it was given to you, well, that sucks. That said, driver problems, especially important ones, aren't that common anymore.
Nailed it. My Linux machine was built from the retired parts from my main desktop, so it very much is stuff that served me well for several years under Windows.
But the advice is still very much to research the hardware or buy a prebuilt with vendor support.
Compared to a decade ago, more stuff just works; especially noticeable with graphics drivers. But when things hiccup, which they still do, it still requires quite a lot of tech savviness to solve.
I can honestly say that I've never had to compile wifi drivers from source in more than a decade of using Linux as my main OS, even through my distrohopping phase. And I'm not researching my hardware ahead of time, either. I don't even know what you'd need to be running in order to have to do that? Maybe void or something similar? I don't think that my experience is particularly unique.
The sharp edges are usually pointing the package manager at a repo (generally an official expansion) that lets you install the necessary binary.
They didn't run over BT. BT is used to initiate communication and share the password to a wifi-network. It then uses that Wi-Fi network for most communication, keeping the BT channel strictly for telephony.
I work as a security architect in a major European company. We're currently demanding a full cryptographic inventory of every new product purchased or service built in-house and will start demanding PQC in 2028.
Not because we expect a workable quantum computer by 2030 (current estimates are around 2035-2040), but because stuff survives for decades in large enterprises (especially if it touches hardware in any way. Think OT, think controllers for all kinds of machines).
Now that PQC is standardized, there's no gain not to demand it (it's basically a demand to use a current openSSL/libreSSL/$library), but not demanding it now will cause a major headache once/if quantum computers work.
TLS connection speed matter only for a very tiny niche of applications; those will choose according to their needs. For the general case, it just doesn't matter.
If your threat model includes store-now-decrypt-later, you should have been demanding PQC for years.
Man, the CBOM is such a pain. There is no standardised format yet (let alone efficient tools for crypto discovery), nobody knew what it was one year ago but now every client is asking ours anyway.
Tell me about it! We've got slightly under 10'000 distinct software assets we are trying to catalogue. There are now a handful of vendors claiming to be able to scan for crypto, but they all suck.
I'm not even there for my employer. I have compiled a list of ~20 different inventory/CBOM solutions and I cannot even fathom how to move to the next step other than picking a few vendors at random and ask them for a demo, but the public info I found was not convincing.
While I can assume these tools do a decent job at crypto asset discovery (a `grep -r "-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----"` is not the hardest product to design), I have no idea what to do for code scanning. CBOMkit and friends do not scan C code, which we actually need.
ZFS on Linux works great, but with most distributions, it will compile the kernel module on device upon installation. Only Ubuntu distributes binaries.
As a consequence, you don't necessarily want a rolling distro, as the ZFS module can get out of sync with the kernel.
ZFS itself is build for both BSD and Linux from the same source, so there's feature parity there.
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